Safe Backup and Data Storage

Background

Nasir has been working on investigating AGA. He has gathered lots of evidence and saved it on his computer. Few days before giving his presentation to his editor in chief his computer crashed and he has lost all his documents and project. He could have backed the documents up before the computer crashed.

Backup is a process of producing additional copies of data, file or other item made in case the original is lost or damaged.

There are so many software that you can use to backup your files in the cloud and they include Google Drive, BOX, DropBox, SkyDrive, iCloud, Crashplan and Mega just to name a few.

Getting Started: What You’ll Need and Installing CrashPlan

Again, we’re focusing on using your friend’s computer as a remote backup location. If you lack a friend willing to share some hard drive space and/or their broadband connection you can easily follow this tutorial to do the backing up over the local network.

Installing CrashPlan is straight forward. Download the application, run the installation file, select a location, and install.

It might seem a bit sluggish for the first minute or so as it scans for files. For this guide we’re going to cut down on the size of the backup considerably so we don’t have to wait for all 16.2 GB in our user folder to seed. The size of your remote backup is limited only by your broadband speed and the space your friend is willing to share.

Configuring Your Backup

Depending on how large the original sweep was you may want to reconfigure the size of your backup before dumping it to your friend’s computer. Look at the bottom of the interface in the Files section and click Change. There you’ll find a directory list with your entire User directory checked. If your backup size is reasonable you can leave it as is. If it captured a lot of bulky directories (like your entire MP3 collection for instance) you might want to opt to locally backup your music instead of chewing up the time and bandwidth transferring it all to your friend’s computer. As we mentioned above, we opted to reduce the number of files for our tutorial in order to avoid a lengthy seed time.

Once you’ve selected the folders you want included in your backup, click on the Friend link in theDestinations section. You’ll see this in the lower section of the screen:

Here you can get your backup code (to share with a friend who wants to backup to your computer) or plug in the code they’ve sent you. We’ll presume that you’ve already cleared this backup-sharing plan with your friend or relative and have their code on hand (and thus can skip the invitation step).

With the code in hand, plug it into the Enter friend’s backup code slot and click start backup. It will immediately start backing up the files if your friend is online. When it’s done you’ll see a screen like this one:

Your files are now stored on the remote machine, a veritable Poor Man’s Cloud Storage. It’s worth noting here that if your total backup size is small (say, a few GBs of documents and photos) it’s worth it to set up this arrangement with multiple friends. You’ll backup their documents and in turn you’ll be able to spread your documents and such across even more remote locations.